Sometimes I Watch You While You're Sleeping
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: She says she doesn't dream. But maybe it's just that she can't remember her dreams. When Elphaba's asleep, it's the only time anyone can really see her...


**A/N: Okay, here's a oneshot I've been writing. Elphaba tells Boq once that she doesn't dream. But is that true…or just doesn't she remember? And what do the people who are most important in her life think when they just get a chance to watch and think about her (when she's asleep, or else she'd bite their heads off for staring!) The lyrics I use at the beginning are from Idina Menzel's song _So Beautiful_ on her album _Here_ (which no stores in my stupid STATE appear to have so I had to order it online but it won't get here until April 7, darn it all!) Also, no Gelphie slash. I'm sorry, and I do see the textual evidence there, and nothing against slash in general, but that one just bugs me for some reason.**

**Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own _Wicked_, book or musical, _Son of A Witch_, or anything else. In other words, I'm not Gregory Maguire, Winnie Holzman, Stephen Schwartz, etc. **

_Sometimes I watch you while you're sleeping_

_I see you're having dreams tonight_

_And I know just by the way you're breathing_

_That I'm the vision in your mind…_

_Frex: _

He tucked the blanket around his daughter, relieved that she was safe. Little green Elphaba's small hand fisted itself against the blanket. She blinked slowly, as if trying hard not to succumb to sleep.

"Horrors," she murmured urgently.

"Yes, Fabala," said Frex absently.

Elphaba set her coal-dark head against the pillow and began to snore delicately. Frex watched the little hand curl and uncurl again and again, beating itself against the mattress.

"Horrors!" she cried in sleep. She threw her fist out again, as if pounding ineffectually against something, or someone.

_Was it a premonition of her life?_ Frex wondered, uncharacteristically. _Railing against the world's horrors and never having any effect?_

He pushed such thoughts away.

_The Unnamed God has an unnamed history for us_, he reminded himself. _Prophecy is nothing. _

He smoothed the brow of the tossing and turning Elphaba and got hit with a light baby fist for his troubles.

"Ssh, Fabala," he murmured, "and sweet dreams. No horrors." This last was, too, a prayer to the Unnamed God for the welfare of Melena's unborn child, be it his or…not.

He touched little Elphaba's forehead one last time before returning to the main room where Turtle Heart, Nanny, Melena, and the fresh start of a child she was carrying awaited him.

_Galinda:_

The thunder rattling the old windowpanes woke her with a start. Galinda sat up in bed, rubbing the last vestiges of sleep from her eyes and straightening her flaxen curls. Even through the rain beating against the roof and the windows, moonlight washed the room in just enough light for her to see by.

Her grasshopper roomie was still dead asleep, snuggled deep into her bed.

Galinda sighed theatrically, half hoping to wake the other girl so that she could have some entertainment; Elphaba, however, did not oblige but merely turned over in her sleep. Galinda was about to pull herself out of bed and awaken the green girl herself, but as she began to pull back the covers of her own bed she paused to look at Elphaba, really look at her, for the first time.

Awash in moonlight, Elphaba's skin was luminescent, reflective. Her raven hair glowed with an ethereal light. She twisted again, somnolently, smiling faintly, dreamily. Galinda was surprised again by the exotic beauty that the other girl could sometimes possess, and was, frankly, a bit jealous of it. Galinda's beauty, though remarkable, was of a more common genre, lovely, to be sure, but not the kind that stopped people on the street and made them stare.

Galinda wondered what dreams were floating through that dark head.

Dreams of the unionist sermons she read, of good and evil? Dreams of strangling Madame Morrible? Of her mysterious childhood?

That, Galinda wondered about.

What were Elphaba's parents like, with their green daughter?

Did they love her?

Galinda somehow had trouble imagining Elphaba with parents. Elphaba was too much and too little of herself at the same time, she was self-sufficient and independent, iconoclastic and an isolate. How did that fit in with parents, with obeying them or being chided?

Elphaba's dreamy smile grew wider.

Galinda wished, again, that she could see inside Elphaba's head.

The blonde girl fell back against her pillows. She pulled her covers up to her chin and let the soft rain lull her to sleep.

Galinda dreamt Elphaba's dream:

Rainbows and the fresh new world that comes after a rainfall, of freedom, of touching the rain without burning, of reaching your potential, of flying, of loving and being loved, of how tears and rain were much the same.

Neither of them remembered the dream when they awoke.

_Fiyero:_

Elphaba-Fabala-Elphie-Fae.

She lay on the mattress, one leg in, one leg out of the blankets. When her eyes were closed and not blazing at you with fierce intensity, she looked young and almost vulnerable.

Well, she was only twenty-three.

The moonlight made her glow to the point where she was almost a moon herself, reflecting and filling the room with light, shining in the dark coldness of the place.

Heat, too, seemed to radiate from her skin. Her eyelashes were coal dust against her soft green cheekbones. She murmured something that he couldn't hear, and began shaking again, that way she sometimes did. She drifted back and forth, fighting the invisible demons haunting her dreams.

Fiyero could only watch; he had learnt from experience that touching her or trying to wake her during these episodes only made it worse, and that he would get soundly walloped by her wildly flailing arms for his pains.

When she finally calmed, still deep in the throes of sleep, he lay down beside her, as close as was possible, clutching her close so that they wouldn't freeze.

When dawn came and Fiyero awoke, Elphaba was already clean and dressed and pouring Malky's milk into a bowl.

"Do hurry," she said to him, "I have to go. And I need three days, now, did I tell you?"

She meant three days alone, to do her work of terrorism, work that alarmed and enchanted him with its idealistic romance and danger.

"Wait," he said. "Fae- Elphaba- what did you dream last night?"

Her eyes shuttered themselves, blocking him out.

"I don't dream," she said. She didn't remember, at least not consciously, but on a deeper level, she knew: That night she'd dreamt his death and her life without him.

_A Young Maunt, Elisa: _

The strange green woman had been there six months, and still she slept on. She had grown quite obviously pregnant as the months wore on, and none of them quite knew what to do.

Crazy old Mother Yackle _thought_ she knew, of course, but then who listened to her?

On this particular day, a new novice maunt was assigned to watch over her, in case she woke or threw up and started to choke, or some such emergency like that.

Elisa had been the girl's name before, but when no one speaks, your name is insignificant. She took with her her sewing and she hummed a little as she sat by the woman's side. A fanciful girl by nature, Elisa began to wonder what had happened to the woman.

Although people in deep coma-sleeps such as hers were generally not given to dreams, this young woman appeared to be.

Her bedcovers were mussed, she twisted and clawed and turned and moaned and sometimes Elisa even thought she cried.

The maunts whispered about her. She'd been covered in blood when she'd arrived.

Elisa reached out a tentative finger and brushed the woman's forearm. She moaned and turned away, murmuring something in her sleep. Elisa leaned forward to hear.

"Fiyero," the woman said. A tear rolled down her green cheek, and she cried out as if in pain.

_Liir:_

It had been six years since Sarima and the others were abducted and Liir was nearly fourteen. Unusually for him, one night, a few weeks before his birthday, he awoke around midnight. He strained his ears; usually when he woke like this it was due to Elphaba: making coffee and in search of the "damn cream," ranting to herself about some obscurity or other, howling in frustration or at the moon, because she felt like it, pounding angrily up a spiral staircase, and even occasionally (this he was not supposed to hear, he knew, but he listened anyway) singing.

But there was nothing.

Liir gingerly crept out of bed- his room used to be Manek's, and in darkness he still half-believed the boy's ghost would appear once more to torment him.

Liir slipped from his room and down the corridor. He heard Nanny's snores from behind one door, and the odd sleep-noises of Chistery and his brood from behind another. Below, he could hear Killyjoy's nails click-clacking on the stone floor.

Daringly, he tiptoed to the staircase that led to Elphaba's tower room. There was no sound from within. Liir inched painstakingly up the stairs, careful not to make a sound. He made it to the door. He pressed his ear up against it- nothing.

Silently, he slid it open.

Books were strewn about Elphaba's magic glass, a lens lay broken at the base of the wall where it appeared she had thrown it in a fit of frustration, and she- well, she herself lay on the dark old bedspread, fully clothed, only her boots removed. Her skinny green arms hung off the side of the bed haphazardly, her hat had tumbled to the floor and her inky hair fanned out behind her, the pins that usually kept it barely in place littering the pillow.

She made a soft noise in her dream, murmured something gentle and incoherent.

It was a voice of hers Liir had never heard before.

Despite himself, he crept forward, wanting to hear her again, wanting to know what she was dreaming- did she dream?

A smile made its slow way across her features, a nice smile, not malicious or cynical or sarcastic. Apparently she did dream.

She opened one eye just the slightest bit, and he jumped back, afraid of her reaction, but sleep still held her in its clutches.

"Yero, my hero," she murmured, mistaking him in the half-light of the room and in her half-consciousness, "I had an awful dream."

"Ssh," said Liir quietly, wondering.

She drifted off to sleep again, smiling and content, dreaming her dream had only been a dream, and not her life.

Maybe it was.


End file.
